After six months as a manager, new managers typically believe their job is

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When some managers take over a new job, they hit the ground running. They learn the ropes, get along with their bosses and subordinates, gain credibility, and ultimately master the situation. Others, however, don’t do so well. What accounts for the difference?

In this article, first published in 1985, Harvard Business School professor John J. Gabarro relates the findings of two sets of field studies he conducted, covering 14 management successions. The first set was a three-year study of four newly assigned division presidents; the second consisted of ten historical case studies. The project comprised American and European organizations with sales varying from $1.2 million to $3 billion. It included turnarounds, normal situations, failures, and triumphs.

According to the author, the taking-charge process follows five predictable stages: taking hold, immersion, reshaping, consolidation, and refinement. These phases are characterized by a series of alternating periods of intense learning (immersion and refinement) and action (taking hold, reshaping, and consolidation). The study’s results put to rest the myth of the all-purpose general manager who can be dropped into any situation and emerge triumphant. Understanding a situation and effecting change do not occur overnight, says Gabarro, and human variables such as managerial styles and effective working relationships make a difference.

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Editor’s Note: A great deal has been written about first managerial jobs and their attendant woes; similarly, there are whole shelves of books devoted to the art and science of becoming a CEO. Fewer publications address what happens when general managers take over a division or function in large organizations. Yet these are the transitions through which a manager becomes—or fails to become—a leader.

More than 20 years ago, Harvard Business School professor John J. Gabarro conducted a research project to examine what happens when general managers take on big new jobs. The project consisted of a three-year longitudinal study followed by a set of ten historical case studies of management successions. Specifically, Gabarro was trying to sort out why some managers failed but others succeeded. In this 1985 article, he reported on his findings: Managers took much longer than predicted to get up to speed; successful transitions followed predictable stages (including two sit-back-and-watch periods of immersion and refinement); industry insiders took charge much faster than outsiders; and a good working relationship with a boss dramatically increased the likelihood of success. Gabarro’s most important finding overall was that taking charge takes a long, long time. Given the now common practice of shortened general-management assignments, are organizations paying a huge, hidden cost?

The subsidiary was in serious trouble, so top management hired a young vice president of marketing with an enviable track record in another industry and gave him carte blanche. He reorganized the marketing function using a brand management concept, restructured the sales division, and devised new marketing strategies. Margins continued to erode, however, and after nine months he lost his job.

In another company, top management also hired a manager from a different industry to turn around a subsidiary’s heavy losses and gave him considerable latitude. He too formulated an entirely new marketing strategy along brand lines. Within a year’s time, margins improved, and within three years the subsidiary was very profitable and sales had doubled.

On the surface, these two situations are strikingly similar. Both executives were in their middle thirties, and neither had experience in his new industry. The two men implemented major changes that were remarkably alike. Furthermore, both worked for difficult bosses. Yet one succeeded and the other failed. What factors account for the different outcomes?

To answer this question, we need to look deeper and explore the contexts the two managers faced, their backgrounds, and the taking-charge process itself.

Although only dramatic examples make headlines, a recent study shows that by the time general managers reach their late forties, they have already taken charge of three to nine management posts.1 Despite the frequency, however, and because situations are unique and managers so different, it is difficult to generalize about the taking-charge process.

Having studied 14 management successions, though, I have found issues common to all and factors that not only affect them but also influence how successful a new person is likely to be. (See the exhibit “The Managers Taking Charge,” which details the research process.)

The Managers Taking Charge This article is based on a research project that consisted of two sets of field studies totaling 14 management successions. The first set was a longitudinal study of four newly assigned division presidents whom I studied over a three-year period as they went about the process of taking charge. The second set consisted of ten historical case studies of management successions, which were used to expand on and verify the longitudinal studies’ results. The 14 cases were chosen to get a range of different kinds of management successions involving both functional and general managers. The successions included American and European organizations varying in sales from $1.2 million to $3 billion. The sample included turnarounds and normal situations and successions that failed as well as those that succeeded.I studied the longitudinal cases using company documents, on-site observation, and field interviews with the new presidents and their subordinates at the end of three, six, 12, 15, 18, 24, 27, 30, and 36 months. For the historical studies, field interviews were conducted and company documents were used.

In using the term taking charge, I am referring to the process of learning and taking action that a manager goes through until he (or she) has mastered a new assignment in sufficient depth to be running the organization as well as resources and constraints allow.

The taking-charge process occurs in several predictable stages, each of which has its own tasks, problems, and dilemmas. My study’s findings also put to rest the myth of the all-purpose general manager who can be dropped into any situation and triumph. To the contrary, my observations indicate that managers’ experiences have a profound and inescapable influence on how they take charge, what areas they focus on, and how successful they are likely to be in mastering the new situation.

The New Manager Arrives

When I looked at the taking-charge process for a period of time, two patterns stood out. First, the process can be long. In the cases studied, for senior U.S. managers, it took from two to two and a half years; some European and UK senior managers took even longer. Second, the taking-charge process does not involve steadily more learning or action. Rather, it is a series of alternating phases of intense learning and intense action. Also, the nature of both the managers’ learning and actions changes over time.

With few exceptions, most new managers’ organizational changes tended to cluster in three bursts of activity. Exhibit I shows these periods quite clearly. Exhibit II illustrates that the same bursts occur regardless of the type of succession. The data presented in Exhibits I, II, III, and IV are for completed successions only, in other words, those in which the new manager lasted in the job for two and a half years or longer. As such, the exhibits do not include data from three of the failed successions. The organizational activity measure is a composite of both structural and personnel changes managers made.

Exhibit I Average Number of Organizational Changes per Three-Month Period Following Succession

Exhibit II Average Number of Organizational Changes per Six-Month Period Following Succession, Categorized

What accounts for this pervasive pattern? Why were the major changes made almost invariably in three waves of action? My observations suggest that the underlying patterns of learning and action account for these periods of intense change. They are natural consequences of how new managers learn and act as they try to master strange situations. More specifically, the data suggest that the taking-charge process occurs in five predictable stages: taking hold, immersion, reshaping, consolidation, and refinement. The length of time the executives I studied spent in each stage varied. Some spent as long as 11 months and others as little as four in the same stage. Thus, time doesn’t define a stage; rather, the nature of learning and the action that characterizes it does. Let’s look at each stage more carefully.

Taking hold.

The first stage, taking hold, typically lasts from three to six months and often sets the tone, if not the direction, for the rest of the taking-charge process. (Exhibit III shows the percentages of personnel and structural changes by six-month periods, which the managers made during their successions.) Taking hold is a period of intense action and learning. If the new assignment is a big promotion or change, the newcomer may at times feel overwhelmed. A new division president commented:

“You’re on the edge of your seat all the time. It feels like you have no knowledge base whatsoever. You have to learn the product, the people, and the problems. You’re trying like hell to learn about the organization and the people awfully fast, and that’s the trickiest thing. At first you’re afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting the apple cart. The problem is you have to keep the business running while you’re learning about it.”

Exhibit III Personnel and Structural Changes Made (by six-month periods)

During this period, a manager is grappling with the nature of the new situation, trying to understand the tasks and problems and assessing the organization and its requirements. Managers orient themselves, evaluate the situation, and develop a cognitive map. For example, one division president who was an industry outsider described his learning task as so large that even locking himself up for four days to review strategic, financial, marketing, and industry reports barely made a dent. Early in this stage, he also reported that it took him several hours to go through the morning mail, not only because the issues were new to him but also because the industry had its own technical jargon and nomenclature. Another manager in a similar situation voiced his exasperation by saying resignedly, “There aren’t enough hours in the day.” (All of the managers in the study happened to be men. I have every reason to believe that female managers would go through the same stages.)

Evaluation and orientation in the taking-hold stage are important even for insiders who already know of the organization and the product. A division president with more than 25 years in his organization spent the first three months in his new job testing his assumptions about key people and the division’s problems. He came to several conclusions, one of which was that a senior vice president in his group was in over his head. The division president based his assessment on a number of meetings with the senior vice president, his subordinates’ opinions, his plan for the previous five years, complaints about cliques in his area, problems with division functions, and the senior VP’s insensitive treatment of two of the company’s major overseas distributors. The last item was particularly troublesome because it made the new president doubt the man’s judgment. Questioning previous perceptions and beliefs characterized most insider successions during this stage.

Actions taken during the taking-hold stage tend to be corrective. Based on their experience and what they have learned about the new situation, managers fix what problems they can. Obviously, corrective actions vary—some are short-term interventions, others take longer. For instance, in one case, although it took nearly five months before the new manager had developed a strategy for turning around the division, because of his experience, within a month he knew that the division needed both a cost system and a product-line reduction immediately.

A group CEO approached this stage quite differently, however. Having been promoted from within and having himself previously turned around the business’s manufacturing operation, he did not make significant short-term corrections his first priority. Rather, focusing on product strategy and planning, he established committees and teams to address these areas. Although his actions did not have the same fix-it quality of the other turnaround, they were nonetheless corrective in that they dealt with areas the new CEO considered critical to the group’s success.

The magnitude of corrective action also varies. In his third month in office, a division president with 25 years of experience in the company reorganized his new area. In contrast, the division presidents who were outsiders did not implement comparable changes until their second year in office, when they were well beyond the taking-hold stage.

Immersion.

Compared with the taking-hold stage, the immersion period is quiet. Exhibit III shows a dramatic decrease in changes after the first six months: Only 6% of organizational and 9% of personnel changes occurred during the second six months, a time period that generally coincided with the beginning of the immersion phase. A lull between bursts of activity, immersion is a very significant time, however, during which executives acquire greater understanding of their new situations. In the U.S. cases I studied, this stage lasted four to 11 months.

During immersion, new managers run the organization in a more informed fashion and steep themselves in a less hectic, finer-grained learning process than was possible when they were taking hold. Consequently, by the end of this stage, they have developed a new concept or at least have greatly revised their ideas of what they need to do.

More focused learning happens during this period because managers immerse themselves in running the organization, and they learn from the interactions and conflicts they deal with day to day. As their experience base grows, they can see patterns they didn’t see before. In one case, for example, even though the new division manager made several momentous changes—reorganizing manufacturing by product lines and implementing better control, scheduling, and cost systems—during the taking-hold stage, manufacturing cost problems persisted. During the immersion stage, he was able to see that many of these had their roots in the product’s design and, ultimately, in how the division’s engineering group was structured. It took, however, six to eight months of exploration before this underlying cause became clear.

Even when changes made in the taking-hold stage work, the immersion period still offers opportunities for further learning. New problems that had been masked or overshadowed by larger problems emerge. For example, after a division president had reorganized his division from a functional to a geographic structure, with a domestic-international split, a new set of problems surfaced during the immersion period that neither he nor his management team had foreseen. The earlier reorganization significantly increased the responsiveness, productivity, and coordination between functions in the United States and abroad, but as these areas improved, the U.S. sales force’s organization and its distribution channels showed weaknesses. The old structure’s cross-functional problems had hidden these weaknesses.

During immersion, new managers also question whether they have the right people in place. Obvious questions about competence arose in the taking-hold stage, but now they were easier to discern. Similarly, in more than half the cases studied, the newcomers explored uncertainties they had about staff members and discussed them with others.

The analysis, probes, discussions, and, in some cases, agony of the immersion stage result in new managers’ arriving at a better understanding of the more basic dynamics of the organization, people, and the industry. The concept that emerges from this stage (whether new or refined) is not necessarily radical. In six of the 14 cases, however, the revised concept had implications for radical changes in either strategy or organization or both. In most of the cases, it also resulted in a sharper plan of action for improving the situation further.

Reshaping.

During the third stage, reshaping, the second important—and in most cases the largest—burst of activity takes place. Learning continues but in a more diminished and routine fashion. In the reshaping period, new managers direct their attention toward reconfiguring one or more aspects of the organization to implement the concept they developed or made final during the immersion stage.

The reshaping stage, like the taking-hold period, involves a great deal of organizational change. Exhibit III shows that more than 32% of the personnel changes and 29% of the structural changes were made during the third six-month period. Again I should caution that the stages did not neatly apportion themselves out into six-month periods. Nonetheless, after 13 to 18 months, most managers studied had reached the reshaping stage, where they were eager to act on the learning and exploration they had experienced in the immersion period. Indeed, immersion activities usually pave the way for reshaping-stage changes.

Immersion is a transition, and by the end of it, new managers and often their key subordinates are impatient to get on with things. In one case, for example, a new division president had to fend off growing pressure from two of his vice presidents while he commissioned several task forces to focus on the areas of intended change. As he put it, “The task force reports will take us to the point where there will be no surprises and a lot of added insights. The nice part of this is that everyone will know what needs to be done, and they’ll have ownership of the changes we decide to make. If the obvious answer is wrong, the reports will flush it out. In the meantime, I have to convince the guys down the hall that the added time this requires is worth it.”

Reshaping-stage changes may involve altering processes as well as making major structural shifts. Two divisions studied went from product to functional structures.

As one would imagine, the reshaping stage is very busy, especially if it involves major changes. For example, when one manager was reorganizing both marketing and sales, he had to call two series of meetings (one with the affected managers and another with the district sales forces to explain the changes), work out details where positional changes and relocations were involved, and call on key customers and distributors. Thus, although management announced plans for the changes at the outset of this stage, their implementation took nearly eight weeks of sustained activity on the part of the new president, his new marketing VP, and his domestic sales manager. As one would expect, the learning in the reshaping stage consists mainly of feedback, for example, on the impact the sales reorganization had on key distributors and on orders.

Reshaping ends when new managers have implemented as much of their concept as circumstances allow. In practice, several factors (the most common is the unavailability of people for key positions) often prevent them from completing the job.

Consolidation.

The third and final wave of action in the taking-charge process occurs during the fourth stage, consolidation. Throughout this period, much of new managers’ learning and action focuses on consolidating and following through on the changes they made during reshaping. The process is evaluative; for example, new managers and their key subordinates judge the consequences of the actions they took in the reshaping burst of activity and take corrective measures.

Learning at this point involves two sets of issues, the first of which is identifying what the leftover follow-through implementation problems are and how to deal with them. For instance, during his reshaping stage, a new president had reorganized his division from a product to a functional structure. But he had deferred integrating one of the former product group’s manufacturing departments into the divisional manufacturing function until several other changes had been completed. When most of the reorganization had been accomplished, he and his manufacturing vice president began to study how the product group could be integrated.

A second set of issues evolves from unanticipated problems resulting from changes made during the reshaping stage. Much of the consolidation period’s extraordinary activity involves diagnosing and studying these problems, then correcting them.

Finally, during consolidation, new managers deal with those aspects of their concept that they could not implement before. In several situations, for instance, managers had to wait to find a person for an important position or to transfer one of the organization’s managers who could not move earlier.

Refinement.

The refinement stage is a period of little organizational change. By this point, executives have taken charge, and their learning and actions tend to focus either on refining operations or on looking for opportunities in the marketplace, in technology, or in other areas. In one case, the manager looked at potential acquisitions; in another, the manager seriously considered divesting part of the business.

This stage marks the end of the taking-charge process. By this time managers can no longer be considered new. They no longer feel new, nor do their subordinates perceive or speak of them as new. Whatever the problems the executives now face, they do not result from newness. By now, they have either established credibility and a power base, or they have not. They have had enough time to shape their situations, and they will be judged by the results of their actions. If they are still uncomfortable, usually it is because of pressing business problems such as a recession or mounting interest rates rather than unfamiliarity with their jobs.

Refinement is a calm period. From this stage onward, managers’ learning will be more incremental and routine. Important developments in the economy, the marketplace, or technology may destroy this calmness, but whatever additional learning and action such factors lead to, they do not result from newness. For better or worse, the manager has taken charge.

What Makes a Difference?

A number of factors shape how executives progress through these stages and how successfully they take charge. Important determinants include a new manager’s experience, whether the business needs turning around, the person’s managerial style and personal needs, his relationships with key people by the end of the first year, and whether the manager’s management style conflicts with that of his boss. Let me describe each of these in more detail.

Roots that endure.

All other things being equal, managers’ functional backgrounds, managerial experiences, and special competencies appear to determine how they take charge: what actions they take and how competently they implement them.

The extent to which managers’ functional experience influences their actions is quite surprising. For 13 of the 14 new managers studied, their initial actions were in areas where they had had functional experience, and the most significant changes they made during the three years also were in the areas where they had experience (see Exhibit IV). This pattern is not surprising for functional managers. But emergence of the same pattern among the general managers reveals the extent to which experience influences actions and points of view.

Exhibit IV Summary of How Managers’ Functional Experience Affected Their Actions

Because Exhibit IV is a summary, it understates both the specificity and pervasiveness of how much the new managers’ experience affected their actions. Exhibit V looks at ten managers’ experience and actions in some detail.

Exhibit V Comparison of Managers’ Functional Experience and Actions Taken (historical studies)

If one thinks in terms of the five taking-charge stages, this pattern is not so surprising. Indeed, one could predict that any significant additional experience base managers gain as a result of taking charge of a new assignment will not be firm until after they have experienced the deeper learning of the immersion stage, acted on this knowledge in the reshaping stage, and learned from these actions in the consolidation stage.

Insiders versus outsiders.

New managers’ experience in their organization’s industry also affected significantly how they took charge and what problems they encountered. First, industry insiders (managers who have five or more years’ experience in the new organization’s industry) take hold much more quickly than do outsiders. Insiders begin with a larger wave of action and their actions tend to be more basic. For example, fully 33% of all of the structural changes industry insiders made occurred during their first six months. Second, the number of actions insiders take is greater not only in the taking-hold stage (in the study, on average, insiders’ actions were twice as frequent) but throughout the entire taking-charge process. Moreover, whereas three of four of the managers who did not succeed in their jobs lacked industry experience, only four of ten successful managers lacked such experience (I defined a failed appointment as one in which the new manager was fired within three years of taking charge).

One case, in which a marketing manager with more than 15 years’ experience in packaged goods and toiletries became marketing and sales director of a $110 million beverage division, illustrates an outsider’s difficulties. On the surface, his background looked like a good fit, but the new industry was different from traditional packaged goods in a number of important ways. The outsider’s experience had served him well in product planning and changing systems during the taking-hold period and later in restructuring the sales force. It had not, however, prepared him for dealing with the sales force or his major distributors, both of which required a hands-on approach. By the end of the taking-hold stage, he was in serious trouble with both groups. By the end of his first year, his cool, professional, managerial style had alienated some key distributors so much that the division general manager had to intervene in several critical situations. These incidents undermined the new manager’s ability to develop credibility with customers and subordinates.

Turning things around.

How unfavorable a new situation was also influenced the taking-charge process in the cases I studied. In turnarounds managers feel a great deal of pressure to act on problems quickly. One might expect that in a turnaround, because of the urgency of the situation, executives would have a shorter taking-hold stage, but neither the aggregated data nor the individual case data support this. If anything, the data suggest that the taking-hold wave actually lasts longer in a turnaround.

Although the action waves are of comparable duration, the activity in the reshaping and consolidation stages peaks earlier in the turnarounds by about three to six months, a pattern which no doubt reflects the urgency experienced in turnarounds.

None of these differences between normal successions and turnarounds that the data uncovered is surprising. Others, which surfaced in manager interviews, are. For one thing, turnaround managers told me they knew they would have to redo later some of the changes they were making in the taking-hold stage.

In one case, the new general manager reported he knew from experience (this was his third turnaround) that it would take five to six months to design and implement a cost system that was sophisticated enough to provide all the information he needed on which products were losing money and why. He concluded that he simply did not have the time to do it perfectly and opted instead for a system that would give him, as quickly as possible, a better vision of the problems.

Managers don’t make such suboptimal decisions gladly. When new managers and their subordinates had fewer problems to deal with (usually in the consolidation period), they would go back and improve the tourniquet systems and processes they had installed earlier.

Although the turnaround managers were under much greater pressure than their nonturnaround counterparts, they benefited from certain advantages. Generally speaking, their companies gave them much more latitude in taking action than the managers had in the normal successions. This was particularly true during the taking-hold stage. The two situations I described in the beginning of the article illustrate this well.

In the first case, after six weeks on the job, the new marketing vice president proposed a wholly new marketing strategy that top management rapidly approved. Such agreeableness is rare in nonturnaround successions. In the second case, the new manager’s head office not only gave him a much greater degree of freedom than it usually gave its division general managers, but it also buffered him from corporate staff intervention for the first two years. After the manager completed the turnaround, top management told him he now had to play by the rules and conform more closely to corporate policies.

Generally, because of the urgency of the situations, the turnaround managers started with a larger power base than their counterparts and faced less rivalry from key subordinates who might have wanted their jobs. But several turnaround managers reported feeling their organizations were fearful and tense, which put additional pressure on them to settle things as quickly as possible.

The new manager’s style.

The 14 men I studied varied significantly in their styles, including how they spent their time—alone, in meetings, on tours—what kinds of meetings and interactions they preferred—one-to-one, recurrently scheduled or specially scheduled meetings, planned meetings versus ad hoc meetings—and their preferences for formality or informality.

Managerial style affects how people respond to an executive initially and influences the entire taking-charge process, including how the person makes decisions. The most dramatic example of this was one president who had a fairly hands-on approach to problems and needed control. Because he thought that the product organization prevented him from seeing problems at the functional level, he struggled throughout the immersion stage. Finally, he reorganized the division from a product to a functional structure. The implementation of this change was painful for the organization and required that several functional vice presidents split their time among three businesses, two of which were geographically separated, so that they had to travel every week. Nonetheless, the total succession went very well.

For this president, acting according to his style was a necessity. During the final debriefing in the study’s fourth year, he told me that he believed he could not have turned the company around without restructuring it to fit his needs. His successor introduced a series of changes, which again made the organization more product oriented.

Relationships with key people.

Perhaps the single most salient difference between the successful and the failed transitions was the quality of the new manager’s working relationships at the end of his first year. For example, at this point, three of four managers in the failed successions had poor working relationships with two or more of their key subordinates and with two or more peers, and all had poor working relationships with their superiors. In contrast, in the same time frame, only one of the new administrators in the successful transitions had a poor relationship with his boss and none had poor relationships with two or more people who reported directly to them.

Many reasons were given for these interpersonal problems, such as rivalry issues, disagreement about goals, different beliefs about what constituted effective performance, and conflicts in management style. The underlying common problem, however, was the new managers’ failure to develop a set of shared expectations with their key subordinates or their bosses. Without common understanding, each side in the relationships inevitably stopped trusting the other.

The studies showed that developing effective working relationships was a critical task in the taking-hold and immersion stages. If managers didn’t explore important differences in the very beginning of their successions, further problems would crop up. Managers in the successful transitions usually confronted problems by the end of the immersion stage and resolved them either by attaining agreement or by parting company.

Conflicts in management style.

Surprisingly, many of the new managers studied (six of 14) described a conflict in styles with their bosses as being a major problem in taking charge. Although conflicts and differences in styles also existed in relationships with subordinates, I am highlighting the problem between new managers and their bosses because this type of discord characterized all but one of the failed successions.

The conflicts always involved control and delegation. In one case, for example, a new general manager five months into the job was exasperated because his boss wouldn’t stop a capital request that the manager’s predecessor had submitted. The boss had asked his technical and financial staffs to review the situation and was waiting for their report before acting. This manager also reported difficulty in getting quick answers from his boss about operational questions. The manager thought his boss delegated too much and wasn’t on top of details.

In contrast, another new executive felt he couldn’t get his boss off his back. The situation finally exploded at the end of the first year when his boss gave him a poor performance evaluation for not being involved enough in details and for delegating too much to his subordinates.

In both these cases, the conflicts arose partly because managers hadn’t clarified expectations with their bosses but mainly because of less rational factors, including profound beliefs about what is good management. Namely, a good executive sets goals clearly and delegates responsibility to subordinates without interfering, while a good manager gets involved in details and is action oriented and decisive.

How can new managers deal with differences in style? In the cases studied, the new managers had to take the initiative to work out differences and make the accommodations needed for working effectively with their bosses. In the first case, for example, the new manager stopped pressing his boss about the capital project; instead he worked with the two staff groups who were conducting the review. The second manager defined his performance targets specifically with his boss, so the boss could delegate to him more comfortably.

In the three successful transitions marked by sharp style conflicts, the managers employed similar means to deal with them.

How stacked is the deck?

As we can see, many variables influence how well managers take charge. Critical factors range from managers’ experience to how effectively they deal with key subordinates and their bosses. Although some are more critical than others, no one factor dominates. Evaluated together, however, they can indicate how much difficulty a new manager will face. Let me illustrate this by returning to the two vignettes that began this article. On the surface they looked so similar, but they turned out so differently.

In the first case, in which the new marketing vice president lasted only nine months, his lack of industry experience hurt him considerably, especially since both his immediate boss and the division’s parent management also lacked industry experience. His boss’s failure to clarify his expectations about performance and a major conflict in management style between the two men further exacerbated the situation. Finally, a poor working relationship with an important peer, who sought to undermine the new manager, complicated his difficulties.

If the deck is stacked, as it was in this case, unless the new manager or his boss is insightful enough to defuse, compensate for, or in some other way minimize problems, the succession is doomed. In the other case, although the parameters were the same, the dynamics among the players were quite different, so that the second new manager prospered where the other failed.

Managing the New Manager

This study’s findings offer several implications that, taken together, challenge a number of assumptions and current practices. First, we can see clearly that understanding a situation and having an impact on it do not occur overnight. Fast-track developmental assignments do not, in the end, benefit the individual, the new unit, or the organization.

The all-purpose general manager who can parachute into any situation and succeed is a myth.

Second, the all-purpose general manager who can parachute into any situation and succeed is a myth. Experience and special competencies do matter.

Finally, human variables such as managerial styles make a difference, not only to the organization’s climate but also to the business decisions a new manager makes and to how he implements them.

Other soft factors, such as potential conflicts in managerial styles and a newcomer’s ability to develop effective working relationships, also seriously affect outcomes. These are, however, subjective factors that often fall into the nondiscussable category that senior management seldom considers when it plans successions. Only the savviest planners factor them in and give them the weight they deserve.

Let me be more specific about the findings’ implications for both managers who are taking charge and organizations that must be concerned with succession planning and career development.

When you are taking charge.

For a manager in the middle of taking charge, this article may be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it may be a relief to know that the process occurs in stages that consist of predictable learning and action tasks (see the exhibit “Taking Charge: Tasks and Dilemmas” for a summary). On the other, to realize that there may still be considerable learning and action to accomplish after the first three to six months on the job can be a bit dismaying.

Taking Charge: Tasks and Dilemmas

The other potentially unsettling implication is that in each of these stages the manager is on a tightrope. For example, if the taking-hold stage is a bit of a honeymoon, it is also a period in which new managers must establish their credibility. If they act too slowly, they risk losing the honeymoon period’s advantages as well as valuable time, and they can appear indecisive. But if new executives act too quickly, they risk making poor decisions because of inadequate knowledge, or they take actions that preclude options they may later wish they had.

Managers who are industry outsiders are on particularly slippery ground. In the absence of good advice or data, they may be better off deferring major changes until they have learned more in the immersion stage. The small first waves of action and large second waves in the outsider successions I studied probably reflect an intuitive recognition of this dilemma.

Finally, interpersonal factors emerge in one fashion or another. If, for example, newcomers find themselves in a managerial style conflict, they should not think it’s bizarre; it occurred in almost half the situations I studied.

In general, a comparison of failed and effective transitions indicates that front-end work is crucial, especially in working out parameters and expectations with bosses. In the successful successions, the new managers made their mandates as specific and explicit as possible. They also made a point of keeping their superiors informed, for example, discussing with them changes they were proposing in detail—particularly during the early taking-charge stages. In contrast, the managers who failed carried vague mandates.

The successful managers were also more aware of their limitations in experience or skills and compensated for them either with selective learning or by drawing on their colleagues’ abilities.

Succession planning and career development.

As the preceding discussion suggests, top management can take a number of steps to help minimize new administrators’ problems. The most obvious of these is making the new person’s charter explicit. If this is not possible (because top management doesn’t understand the unit’s business or the industry is in a period of turmoil), the new manager should know it. For example, in the opening vignette in which the new manager failed after nine months, headquarters hadn’t told him that the most urgent priority was to reverse a decline in the newly acquired subsidiary’s margins. The innocent new vice president started off buying market share, which inevitably eroded further the margins in the short term.

There are other things companies can do to facilitate the taking-charge process. General Electric, for example, runs assimilation meetings to accelerate working out expectations between new managers and their key subordinates. Conducted by the human resource staff, these meetings give new managers and those who report directly to them the opportunity to talk about expectations and other concerns early in a new manager’s tenure. Top management can also anticipate the potential problems new managers who lack relevant experience face, particularly during the taking-charge stages, and lessen them by providing adequate—subordinate or corporate—backup support.

An important implication of this research for succession planning is that taking charge (defined in terms of impact and learning) takes time. Companies that make brief assignments at upper and middle levels will get quick fixes. If assignments are too short for a new manager to go beyond the taking-hold stage, the new manager will deal only with those problems that he or she knows how to fix. That may be enough if a manager’s experience base is broad and deep, but when short-term assignments become company policy, both individual units and the organization as a whole suffer eventually. Taken to its extreme, such a policy feeds the obsession with short-term results that many observers have criticized.2

Short-term assignments also make little sense from a career development point of view. In most brief assignments, managers can’t progress beyond the immersion stage. Yet the payoffs for the organization in substantive change and for the individual in important residual learning and added experience don’t come until later. Significant new learning begins in the immersion stage when the outsider is familiar enough to probe underlying issues and subtle cause-and-effect relationships. Managers cannot test this new learning, though, until they act in the reshaping stage, evaluate their actions, and learn more in the consolidation and refinement stages.

The importance of experience also has several implications for succession planning and career development. All other factors being equal, an insider with industry-specific or other relevant experience is more likely to take charge with fewer difficulties than an outsider without industry-specific experience. Three of the four managers who failed were industry outsiders in well-run U.S. and European companies.

The importance of experience, which the study highlighted, also challenges the concept of the professional manager. Although turnaround specialists can succeed in a variety of situations, they are the exception, not the rule; in fact, they are themselves specialists of a kind.

I am not arguing that general management skills don’t exist or that people can’t transfer them into new settings. I am pointing out that lack of relevant industry or functional experience will make the taking-charge process more difficult, and companies should consider this when planning successions.

When choosing successors to managerial posts, top management has to make some difficult trade-offs in terms of what is good for the person, the unit, and the organization. If one of the organization’s objectives is to develop a well-trained pool of managerial talent, then the head office should put executives in assignments that stretch them by broadening their experience. This will inevitably mean putting people with less than optimal experience in charge of units whose performance may suffer, at least in the short term. The question is whether the benefits to the person and to the larger organization are worth the costs. Also, because managers, like all human beings, learn from the feedback of bad as well as good experiences (some may argue they learn more from the ones that turn out badly), top management has to judge how long to keep executives in situations where they are having problems.

On the other hand, if management always assigns people with strong relevant experience, it forfeits giving executives broadening experiences, which become increasingly important at middle and upper levels. The guideline should be to provide developmental assignments that are not totally out of line with a manager’s experience and that last long enough to produce important lessons.

1. John P. Kotter, The General Managers (Free Press, 1982).

2. Robert H. Hayes and William J. Abernathy, “Managing Our Way to Economic Decline,” HBR July–August 1980.

A version of this article appeared in the January 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review.

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